Category Archives: Rights

This is the world as remade by lawyers. This is why movies are shit reboot after shit reboot. This is why TV does shit reboot after shit reboot. Art becomes “property,” like fucking real estate. Those who can’t do, who can never understand, rape the dreams of creators and turn them into whores for all the world to see.

The people who say “this is just people fighting about money” always then seem to follow it up by spitting on Kirby’s heirs by saying “they didn’t have anything to do with it”. Well, the execs and investors in Disney didn’t have anything to do with Kirby’s success either, yet they’ve made a ton of money on his ideas.

Jack Kirby and his heirs are flesh and blood people with names and faces attached to them.

All the Suits who have fed — and are now feeding — on the trough that Kirby built are nameless and invisible.

While there are no legal consequences (like fines) under the DMCA for copyright abusers, there is a provision that allows victims of censorship (and their web hosts) to bring legal action against those who submit fraudulent DMCA notices. So today, we’ve joined with Oliver, Ivan and Adam to take a small strike back at DMCA abuse. We’ve filed two lawsuits for damages under Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which allows for suits against those who “knowingly materially misrepresent” a case of copyright infringement.

I was against Google. But I’m not going to bother to link to all my posts.

This is bullshit:

He [Judge Chin] also said Google’s digitization was “transformative,” meaning it gave the books a new purpose or character, and could be expected to boost rather than reduce book sales.

If scanning a book is “transformative,” then my posting a short clip from a TV program or movie on YouTube for fair use in a post should be as well. Yet I’ve had two such clips DMCAed away and Google has threatened me with account deletion if I do it again (or am caught doing it again, harumph).

I have been a user of Google Books for longer than I can remember. Proportionally, they place more of a book online than any of my short clips do of any TV program or movie.

Yet they get a fucking free pass — for grabbing all the books.

While I’m under threat by Google for just two alleged violations.

I look forward to Google doing Video Search and grabbing all the TV and all the movies. Because that’s what they do. They need to build shit to slap ads on. It’s how they make their money.

This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

Next-day update:Big Boss, Not Big Brother, Spotted Long Island Family’s ‘Suspicious’ Google Searches. She has just made it more difficult for people to believe anyone else who is a victim of the NSA dragnet. How anyone with her credentials could have created such an error-ridden report is just scandalous. If you get a visit, ask for business cards from the law enforcement agents so you can prove who the hell they were.

Without a statement from the committee behind ReLIRE, it’s hard to know if these works have been removed from the registry because they were errors, or if the authors, translator or publisher concerned has submitted an opt-out. As a commenter pointed out on Lionel Maurel’s blog, the lack of transparency concerning the contents of the registry makes it difficult to know the status of a book on the list, for example whether it has been opposed, confirmed, etc. So it isn’t obvious why these works have now been removed.

Isn’t it funny how that braying dickhead Scott Turow — who always reminds us he is President of the Authors Guild — doesn’t seem to know that this unprecedented robbery of writers is being attempted in France?

Among the authors I found in the registry are Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and R.A. Rafferty. You won’t find them by searching for their names in the author field, but the anthology in question shows up in a free text search using their names. Although ReLIRE doesn’t present the catalog details, apparently it does use them to present search results. Here is the catalog listing from the Bibliothèque National de France.

Now that some prominent American names are in the crosshairs, will this news finally get some goddammed traction?

In France there is now a double standard for piracy: it’s illegal for individuals to copy material without permission and share it freely online, but for some works the state can make a digital copy without permission and allow its sale for commercial gain. This looks like the plundering of individual property for private gain, which deprives writers of the rewards of their own labors and deprives the public of open access to orphan works.